Thursday, 21 June 2012

Karl Richardson - Video Nasty!

Another incredibly cool cover from the excellent Karl Richardson for the wonderful Grey Area strip. Karl did all the designs for the characters and locations in the strip so it's great to se him on cover duties. In this weeks' episode, greeted ETC Officer Kymn has been captured by far right alien extremists who plan to kill him if the aliens aren't exiled from earth. Can the rest of Kymn's squad reach him in time?

Below is Karl's sketch for the cover. He's said in previous posts that he simply paints digitally straight on top of his roughs, the talented git!

Karl's rough and ready sketch. Poor Kymn!

Here we see Karl has begun his amazing painting. The figures quite roughly done but we get a real sense of how the cover is going to turn out. Note the unfinished legs and lack of minor details on Kymn...

Those fellas are legless!

Karl does more work to the figures, cleaning up those broad brush strokes considerably and adding cool details such as the name badge and the mesh effect to the fabric...

Fishnet stockings or cool kevlar armour, you decide!

Almost finished, Karl has dressed the warehouse with various wires and detritus and lit the scene to really bring the image to life...

Kymn is looking severely cheesed off now...

Finally the film grain and video camera effects are added, giving the cover a very real sense of grime and urgency...